Through A Glass Darkly
by MysteryTrek
Summary: There's been a new world on the horizon ever since the Asteroid Crisis, and the Fenton's and their allies are the center of it. But this new world isn't going to come without costs: old enemies lurk in the shadows still, waiting for a chance to strike, and a new one has come. An alien race that automatically destroys any other race they consider a threat. And they're already here.
1. Chapter One

"And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

-T.S. Elliot, "The Waste Land"

Chapter One

Paulina Ortega sighed in irritation as she drove her red Ford Taurus down the road to Amity Park, resisting the urge to strangle the blonde numbskull currently buckled in to her passenger seat. _Be fair,_ the chastising thought flashed through Paulina's brain, _Starr Corner is about as far from 'blonde numbskull' as a human being can get. She's just…impulsive. Then again, so are you._ It was a bit hard, however, for her to maintain her objectivity when there was a throbbing bruise on her right cheek, and an ache in her ribs. "I'm going to kill you when we get home," she muttered aloud.

"Hey," Starr muttered as she pressed an ice patch to the purple mass of her left eye, her face darkened in the shadow of the sun setting behind them, "That psychobitch ex-girlfriend of his showing up was _not_ part of the plan."  
"No," Paulina snapped, shooting a quick glare at her. "But launching yourself at her when her sister and her friends are right there, ready to throw down?!"

"I had my best friend to back me up," she shot back airily.

"We were outnumbered _three to one_ , and that's if we include your date!" She cocked her head as she remembered the question she'd been meaning to ask her all day. "Speaking of which, where did you meet him anyway?"

"Online."

"Mother of God," she muttered, resisting the urge to just check out, say, "Jesus take the wheel," and pass out with her head on the steering wheel, the car's horn blaring as they careened into oncoming traffic.

"What?" Starr said, shooting a glare at her. "It's not like you don't meet up with guys you met online. Besides, it's not like _he's_ the loon."

"Ask me that when my ribs stop hurting," Paulina muttered back, wincing slightly at a twinge of pain in her torso. Truth be told she was right. She did meet up with guys she met online. Her last date had ended with the two of them in his car, with no complaints all around so she wasn't totally opposed to the concept. But this incident exemplified the downsides of online dating,

Even so, Starr _did_ have a point. Considering the fullest extent of the downsides, written in blood and pain and shattered lives, an angry ex showing up (that he had, truth be told, been upfront about) was far from the worst possible outcome of a date with someone you met online.

Which didn't do much at all to ease the pain in her ribcage and the massive bruise purpling on her right cheek, and the fact that they were now driving home in what was rapidly approaching after dark, which they were still two young to do. She checked the dial on her speedometer, making sure they were driving well below the speed limit. The last thing she needed was to be pulled over by police _now._ She just wanted to drop Starr off, go home, and crawl into bed for the night.

She'd barely finished the thought when she felt herself pitch forward slightly as her car abruptly lurched before it began to bleed of momentum. _Oh, great,_ she thought sullenly, _what now?_

She pulled her car over in front of a wheat field before it came to a halt entirely.

Paulina sighed, popping the hood and before getting out of the car and looking over the engine block, hoping to see whatever was causing the problem before she was noticed by say a police cruiser.

She saw nothing. Nothing she could see at least. Which meant it was probably the battery, and since spares were dangerous to lug around, she didn't have one on hand. She sighed anxiously. She was going to have to call a tow truck and risk the uncomfortable questions that would almost certainly end with her hauled before a judge to have her license suspended.

"Well?" Starr asked, her head sticking out the passenger side window.

"I can't see anything wrong, Starr, I'm going to have to call AAA," Paulina said resignedly, shoving her hand into her pocket and grasping the cool plastic of her phone.

"Wait, Polly," Starr said, getting out of the car, and walking over to her, a resigned look on her face. "I'll call. And pay for it. If our age comes up I'll say I was the one driving."

The sheer generosity in that statement struck her like a blow to the stomach. "Are-are you sure?"  
"Hey," Starr said, a wan smile on her face. "It's the least I can do. And besides, I don't have a car to begin with so it's not going to be too disruptive if they suspend my license."

"But Starr-," Paulina began plaintively; she refused to let Starr take the fall for her actions.

"Enough, Polly," Starr said, her voice hardening as she pulled her phone out of her pocket. "I'm doing it."

Starr had just brought the phone up and was beginning to dial the number for roadside assistance when a bright light flared to life over her head. The two women's screams cut through the air, squeezing her eyes shut against the blinding, painful strobe. She felt a sharp tingling sensation running down the length of her spine.

The last sensation she felt before oblivion took her was the feeling that her entire body had been yanked off the ground.

Paulina didn't know how long she'd been floating in darkness before her body jerked as she felt something sticking into her back. She squinted and rolled over to find a more comfortable position, only to find herself with a rock pressing sharply into her bruised ribs. She winced, eyes bursting open at the sharp pain.

To see her staring at a moonlit wheat field, the stalks blowing gently in the evening breeze.

 _What?_ She thought, as she scrambled to her feet, the memory of what had happened flooding back to her, at least partially. _I remember Starr pulling out her phone, then that bright light, and that's it._ Her breath hitched as she realized she couldn't see Starr.

"Starr?" She called out, casting about wildly for any sign of her friend as fear ran down her spine.

No one answered; there were only the loud, insistent chirp of crickets, and the cool breeze blowing up through the south, susurrating through the wheat field.

"Starr?!" She shouted again, alarmed, propping up on her shoulders, and jerking her head around, frantically scanning for any sign of her friend in the moonless night

Then she saw it, the unmistakable silhouette of an adult female human lying spread-eagled on the ground.

She scrambled to her feet and darted for her car, yanking out the flashlight and first aid kit she kept under the passenger side seat at all times. She clicked the yellow, heavy-duty flashlight on, the pale blue light LED shining out over the green-brown ground.

Her heart leapt into her throat at the unmistakable sight of her best friend lying face down by the side of the road, her blonde hair flowing out like a blanket

She ran forward, kneeling down and pulling Starr over on her front, breathing a sigh of relief when she started blinking her green eyes in surprise.

"Whathellhappen?" her best friend muttered, eyes staring off into space.

Paulina needed to snap her friend out of her delirium. "Can you walk?" Paulina asked in her best cheer captain voice, as though they were on the practice field and she needed to get her people into formation. She and Starr had been cheerleaders for years, and as a result, taking orders in a high-pressure situation was as natural as breathing.

Starr's eyes refocused on her immediately and she nodded firmly, and Paulina held out her hand. "What the hell happened?" She repeated clearer this time, though there was a distinct waver of shock in her voice after she grabbed her hand and pulled herself off the ground,

"I don't know. But we should get probably get out of here."

"I agree," Starr said and the two women rushed back to their cars, fear driving them forward as they tore the doors on either side open and scrambled inside. A moment of terrified fumbling with the car keys later, she breathed a sigh of stunned relief as her car flared to life. She slammed on the gas, barreling down the road as fast as they could.

"What do we do?" Starr asked her voice wavering further as they tore down the road. The clocks on their phones had been frozen for thirty seconds on the time it'd been when they'd had to pull over, 6:30 before switching over to the actual time. 9:00.

There was a blank space in their memories of two and a half hours that neither of them could account for at all.

"I don't know," Paulina blurted out, a lump forming in her throat. "I don't know," _What the hell happened out there? One second Starr was about to call for a tow, the next we're lying unconscious in the middle of the road and I don't for the life of me know how the hell we got there?!_

"I don't think we should go home tonight," Starr said, breathing heavily. "At least not right away. Thank God both of our families are out of town. You couldn't pay me to try to explain this to them right now. Look, there's only one group of people who know how to deal with something like this, you know who we've got to see."

"Yeah," Paulina said, sighing, that very thought had been in the back of her mind the past few minutes. "Yeah I know."

"He's going to be pissed at us, no doubt," Starr continued. "So will Sam. But we have no choice. We need to know what happened, and they're the only two people we know who can even begin to help us. Besides, now that we've had a…massive dose of reality," Starr said, an interesting euphemism for a massive Texas-sized asteroid that nearly wiped out their planet. "I think he'll help us anyway, that's just who he is."

"I know," Paulina responded after a moment, guilt stabbing at her. Facing the end of their lives and the lives of every other human being in existence had forced her and a lot of other people she knew to look at themselves in the mirror. And while she couldn't speak for all of her peers, she and Starr had recoiled in disgust from what they saw: two selfish, vapid little girls who thought that their social status in a high school career that was due to be take away from them in, well, a year now. Only to have the real world intrude on it in a very rude, very violent way they could no longer simply ignore as someone else's problem, and made it very clear that that world was very much easier to destroy than they thought. And that it wasn't people like her who were the only people worth mentioning.

"All right, we'll go see him."

"Tonight?"

Paulina sighed. "Tonight."

* * *

Daniel Fenton pushed open the door to the master bedroom at FentonWorks as he and Sam walked into what was now their room. It was there date night, and they'd just got back from a trip to the Nasty Burger.

He walked over to the shorter girl, eyes drinking her in. The five foot two young woman was thin, with black hair and iridescent blue eyes that flashed purple in certain lights, that he'd always enjoyed losing himself in whenever possible. She was frequently thought of as scrawny and boyish due to her height, slimness, and lack of chest.

 _Those people were idiots_ , he thought, smiling with unabashed lust and pride at his lover. Everyone else's superficial appraisal of her ended when they got to the Goth look and the combat boots, but not his. She _was_ naturally thin yes, but she was also physically fit, with a toned, shapely figure, especially in her legs and hips that her lack of chest actually complimented, not detracted from.

Sam walked over, deliberately swaying her hips in an attempt to get his attention before wrapping her arms around his neck.

"You seem distracted," she said, shooting him a concerned look.

"Just thinking about us," Danny responded with a smile of his own, wrapping his arms around her waist, "and how we got here."

"It's been a hell of a ride," she said, smiling.

Danny smirked. "To think, your father thinks I'm almost respectable these days."

"Your parent's company's changing the world, Danny," Sam said. "It's still very early days, but anyone with a functioning brainstem and even a modicum of sense can see the changes coming already."

The fact that the research and development his parents had been pursuing in their all but single-minded devotion to studying ghosts had had applications outside the field of ghost hunting had been obvious to everyone except his parents. And after the Asteroid Incident, they'd been perfectly happy to go right back to the status quo… for about five minutes, until the status quo changed forever.

Not so much as it came to his secret identity. Everyone at McMurdo Station who'd become aware of his secret identity had been sworn to secrecy, and his identity had been classified top secret as per section 11C-9 of the National Security Act of 1947. And, or so he'd been told, compartmentalized in such a way that not even the Director of the Ecto Control Agency, disparagingly known as the Guys in White, didn't have clearance for that information without approval from the Director of National Intelligence, under whose jurisdiction the ECA fell.

And given that they've been coming under increasing fire for their methods, with two bills calling for their outright dissolution (something that as far as he was concerned, couldn't come fast enough) in the House and one in the Senate, that approval wasn't likely coming in the foreseeable future.

The other changes coming also couldn't come fast enough. He, his sister Jazz, Sam, and Tucker had cornered his parents and convinced them to actually start exploring, and marketing, the other applications to come out of their ghost research; applications that had the potential to affect virtually every aspect of the human condition. The quantum leap in bioengineering that had gone into Vlad's cloning technology could be, under ethical conditions this time, repurposed to allow cloning of organs and limbs for transplants, for example.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In their single-minded devotion to studying ghosts and/or destroying their enemies, the Fentons and Vlad between them had managed to develop the technologies between them to reach the holy grail of human exploration and achievement. Practical, large-scale space travel that could give mankind access to the resources of it's own solar system. Where there were resources enough to sustain the new spacefaring civilization on the horizon and lift billions of people out of poverty.

Also, there was enough space out, in well, space to build anything. Aside from spacecraft, it would do wonders for the _non-_ controversial aspects of environmental preservation to move most major extractive and manufacturing industries into space within the next ten to fifteen years, which analysts were already predicting.

There was a new world on the horizon. And his parents were at the forefront of it. They couldn't do everything of course. They'd let other companies purchase the IP's for Vlad's innovations in biomedicine, for example. FentonWorks, with a generous loan from Sam, had taken on the aeronautics weapons manufacturing, and engineering side of things. Which were already making dividends and improving at least his father's view of their family.

Sam's mother however, was not. Pamela Manson was convinced that her daughter's preferences," both in clothing and mate, weren't "respectable," would destroy her reputation and theirs, and that her best bet to secure her future was to adopt brighter clothing, adopt a "normal" career path that wouldn't look bad, and preferably find a "normal" partner while she was at it. She wasn't an evil woman, by any standard, and she really _was_ doing what she thought was best for the daughter she genuinely loved.

No, the main problem was that Pamela Manson was what was steadily approaching an anachronism in most wealthy families of the late twentieth to twenty-first centuries: a wealthy magnate's wife who had no part in the running of the family business. Not because her husband was a misogynist, far from it, but simply because she had no experience or training sufficient to play any role beyond political hostess. The trend was for both partners in a marriage to be wealthy businessmen and women, even if they had completely separate businesses. They would have found the common ground enough to at least respect her daughter's work ethic, and skill in her area of expertise, even if they disagreed with the career path in question. It was that which had bridged much of the gap between her and her father.

Not Mrs. Manson. She had grown up at the tail end of that age where the women in wealthy families were expected to be little more than house managers and political hostesses, and she'd accepted and genuinely looked forward to that role in life. It didn't make her _weak_ by any means. Sam got much of her personality in large part from her mother, but it didn't make relations between them any easier. More than that, it also proved the old saw that "morality binds and _blinds_." She was as ideologically blinkered in her own way as her daughter had been.

Frequently, interactions between them also proved another old saw: The one about what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

"Not that I give a damn what anyone else thinks about you," Sam said, smiling, and wrapping her arms around his neck, drawing him out of his worried musings about Sam's relationship with her family. "Now," she said suggestively, "why don't you take me to bed and do with your hands what you were doing with your eyes all afternoon during lunch."

Danny smiled, pulling Sam deeper into his powerful embrace, lifting her off the ground by the waist and prying her lips apart with his tongue. Sam's moans rang in his ears and he smiled against her lips as her legs wrapped around his waist as he guided them towards the bed.

* * *

 _Sam stood in the FentonWorks basement, bathed in the green light of the ghost portal. She felt alive. More alive than she'd ever felt._ I can finally do what I want, _she thought._ I can finally remake the world, make it better. Once those frail weak nothings that I used to naively call my people are finally all dealt with. And to think I once wanted to _help_ those short-sighted reactionary fuckers, _she thought. Fools. They were fools all of them; fools who kept killing their own world, poisoning their bodies, and grinding under their fellow men. Fools. Who clung to their short- sighted antiquated beliefs despite an objectively better way before them._ Plants really are better than people, _she thought._ Branches don't tear leaves off one another, roots don't hoard water from the trunk. They grow together in a harmonious whole. _It's about time they_ all _were fed to plants._

 _Except one_. _The boy, the_ man _, floating in front of the portal about to run away from her forever. She felt her legs weaken._ No, _she thought desperately, pain as such she'd never felt before burning like fire through her veins. She had an entire world to remake. She needed him by her side to help do it._

 _"Stay, Danny. Stay and rule with me."_

Sam's eyes flew open, and she found herself staring up at the brown oak ceiling. She felt her dry tongue in her mouth as she took stock of her situation. Her hair was tousled, all her clothes had been stripped away and she was enveloped in her exhausted lover's arms. She should be feeling great, but she wasn't. Not anymore. Even the warm feel of Danny's powerful arms around her waist didn't do much to dispel the self-loathing that settled into her bones like a thick black cloud at times. Especially at night. When she'd wake up and stare at the ceiling, at the memories of that black day when she'd cast aside everything she'd ever claimed to believe in and betrayed her own race.

She felt Danny stir against her. "How long have you been awake?"

"Oh, not long," Sam responded. She looked out the window. The setting sun outside was throwing shadows in their bedroom. What had once been Jack and Maddie's bedroom until they'd moved into a suite of rooms above Axion Labs to work on the Hephaistos orbital project, FentonWorks proof of concept that it was in fact feasible to move industrial manufacturing into orbit. Laying the groundwork, to say nothing of the actual construction, would occupy their time for the foreseeable future, so they'd given their newly emancipated (for their role in the Asteroid Crisis) son the lease on their house, and let (the also newly-emancipated) Sam move in with him.

She closed her eyes, tensing under Danny's arms at the pain that flooded through her. There was a new future on the horizon that promised to solve all the problems that she'd been agitating against ever since she was old enough to at least begin to understand the concepts involved.

And she'd come unthinkably close to exterminating her own kind before they could take those first steps into a new frontier.

 _You either die a hero,_ _or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain._

"What's wrong?" Danny asked from next to her.

"Nothing," Sam said, and pushing herself even further back into her bed.

"Sam," Danny said dangerously. "You can't fool me. What's wrong?"

"I dreamed I was Undergrowth's apprentice again. That you were about to escape into the Ghost Zone, and I was demanding that you stay to rule with me over a world flensed of human life," she said, voice filled with bitter self-loathing.

"You weren't yourself," Danny said sympathetically, "You were under Undergrowth's control."

"This isn't _Star Trek: The Next Generation,_ Danny, and I wasn't Locutus." Sam responded harshly. "There was no hive mind to control my actions. I was his _apprentice_ , not his puppet."

Danny's arms withdrew from her waist and Sam turned to look at him, to be greeted with a disbelieving stare.

"You couldn't have _wanted_ to be doing everything you did," Danny said very carefully.

"He messed with my inhibitions, yes," Sam responded. "But _I_ was in control of my actions. He offered me the chance to have the world on a silver platter and I took it. All I could think in that moment was, finally, I had the chance to remake the world. In that moment I was so angry at the human race, a race that seems committed to destroying its own environment…and I decided to destroy that race in turn, God forgive me."

"You wouldn't have made that decision under normal circumstances," Danny pointed out, "you said it yourself, your inhibitions were gone."

"Maybe so," she said after a moment, "but when I was back to normal, I thought long and hard, about precisely _why_ I was chosen to destroy humanity for him. He chose me for a reason, Danny, and not just because I love plants. But because I had the two most dangerous things in any person. I wanted everyone to tow my line and I was a radical extremist, who genuinely believed that everyone who disagreed was not simply wrong, or had a different beliefs than I do, but were actively aggressive against innocent victims. That if I could just stop them from spewing their lies, the people would wake up to how they'd been used and sign on with me," she said with a bitter laugh. "It was only a short trip from seeing everyone who disagreed with me as monsters in human skin to seeing _everyone_ as monsters."

"It's not all bad. Needing to be in control and the ability to make people do what you want, for all their negative aspects, are the traits of good leaders," Danny pointed out. "And you _are_ a good leader."

"Who nearly ended human existence in a fit of pique," Sam growled, squeezing her eyes, at the tears that were welling up inside her. "My God. I almost _murdered_ everyone I ever loved, and I _wanted to do it_." Her tears began to run down her cheeks and she felt Danny's eyes arms envelop her and pull her into his embrace. She leaned and began to cry into his bare shoulder.

"You're not a monster, Sam. You've never been, not even then. I happened to think you needed to learn to respect other's opinions, but you've learned that lesson well."

She pulled from his embrace and looked at her boyfriend, as the thought that flitted in and out of Sam's mind at times like this flowed around.

"Have you ever read _Mein_ _Kampf_ , Danny?" She said after a long moment, referring to Hitler's infamous ranting, anti-Semitic "autobiography."

"No," Danny said quizzically, "can't say that I particularly want to either. Why?"

"People should read it," Sam responded, "if only to get a glimpse of true evil," she said. "At any rate, there's a line where he's talking about the 'Jewish threat,'" she said with all the scorn that concept deserved. "Basically he said that Jews aren't human and that if the 'Jew triumphs, then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.' That Earth will 'once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago,' and those are direct quotes by the way." She sighed, closing her eyes again, "And there I was, a young Jewish woman, proving his point."

"That's ridiculous, Sam," Danny said, sharply, his voice hardening. "Most people don't even _remember_ what happened at all. Much less know you were involved and decide to use your actions when you weren't of sound mind to justify bigotry."

"True," Sam said, "but that's just the thing. The operative word here is 'most.' I'm quite sure that there are more than a few people besides myself who's memory of what happened as since resurfaced.' And while I'm sure that most of them who remember enough and know enough are willing to settle for blaming me alone, you and I both know that there's a good chance that there's at least one person out there who isn't." _And you and I both know that 'of sound mind' is a subjective term, that's not going to convince everybody if my role in those events_ does _become generally known._

Silence descended on the room, as the implications of what she just said settled over them.

A silence that was broken as the sounds of a fist rapping on the door exploded through the house in sharp bursts.

Danny rolled out of bed, pulled on his bathrobe and walked over to the window. "It's Paulina and Starr," he said, surprised.

The incongruity of Paulina and Starr showing up stunned her out of her reverie, and Sam was pulling on her own bathrobe as she walked over to the window to see for herself.

Sure enough Paulina and Starr were standing on the porch. The five foot ten black-haired young woman and her equally tall blonde friend were looked beat up _,_ she noted, concerned almost despite herself. Even in the dull yellow-orange of the street lights, she could see the massive bruise on Paulina's right cheek, and that Starr had a massive black eye. And that they were terrified: they kept staring around them, as though they were expecting someone to jump them.

 _Or someone_ else _,_ she said, sighing, her concern mounting. She and Danny looked at each other before Danny nodded and raised his fist to the window, rapping on it gently to get their attention.

"Just a minute," he shouted when they darted up to look at the stairs, before the two of them hastily collected and put back on their street clothes

Three minutes later a hastily dressed Sam and Danny were rushing down the stairs. Danny crossed over to the door and opened it up to reveal a disheveled Paulina and Starr looking at them with unabashed relief.

"Thank God," Paulina started in immediately, voice trembling with barely suppressed fear mixed with relief. "We need your help."

"What happened?" Sam asked, walking over to stand next to her boyfriend.

Paulina sighed. "That's just it. We don't really know."

A/N: I decided to put in the discourse about _Mein Kampf_ because of a course I took about the Holocaust during the Spring semester. My very first document analysis for that course was an analysis of those first couple chapters of _Mein Kampf_ where Hitler lays out the reasons for his conversion to fanatical anti-Semitism. I was writing another story at the time, so this particular thing didn't occur to me at the time. Then the realization hit me as I was thinking about the events of "Urban Jungle" for _this_ story. While I don't for the moment believe that's what neither Butch Hartman nor Wincat Alcala were aiming for in the slightest, they wanted to tell a story about a plant monster that brainwashes someone and she was the natural choice due to her established love of plants, the implications _are there_ if you think about them long enough. And they'd occur to Sam too in universe. Also, this isn't just a random philosophical musing on their part, the personal repercussions for Sam of that incident, and an exploration of the very real and disturbing rise of antisemitism in North America and Europe, are a key subplot in this story. I know I'm going to have to handle that aspect of the story _very_ carefully, but it's something that needs to be explored.


	2. Chapter Two

"The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (November 30, 1874-January 24, 1965), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom May 10, 1940-July 26, 1945

Chapter Two

Valerie hung in midair, suspended her wing's turbines as she stared out over the vast yellow-gold lights of the Chicago area spread out below her, as far as the eye could see, even in the air. It looked so peaceful from up there, so quiet, as though the problems that gripped so much of the area didn't exist. And from a certain standpoint it was. Ghost attacks in the area had slowed down dramatically in the course of the previous year. Apart from the occasional skirmish with Skulker, they seemed to be giving Amity Park a wide berth. For now.

Emphasis on _Amity Park_ , random ghost portals still formed every day, letting ghosts back into this dimension. That coupled with the permanent gateway in the Bermuda Triangle met that ghost incursions were becoming a regular thing throughout the Western Hemisphere. They could just come through in the Triangle and make their way anywhere in the Americas that suited their fancy.

 _Which is why Danielle is still fairly busy_ , _and why she has trouble getting this far north these days._

Danielle's approach was different from there's. While she relied on patrolling as much as they did, she also didn't have routine access to advanced sensor suites that could cover an entire mid-sized state at a time. So she had put together a network of informants. Mostly people she'd befriended and/or saved, and who agreed to keep an eye out on possible future incursions for her. They also opened their home to her, giving her places to rest in relative safety.

 _It also keeps her firmly in the Deep South these days, unfortunately._ _The idea had been that one day she'd settle down here. Still it's probably good that_ someone _be trying to keep a lid on the problem. Lord knows, nothing's going to be happening up here anytime soon._

Then a message icon appeared on her HUD, blinking an ominous red, indicating a priority flash message from FentonWorks Operations.

She looked straight at the message and blinked, the sensors in her suit translating the blink as a command to access the message.

The suit's computer uploaded the days encryption codes and the message popped up.

 _From: Samantha Manson, FentonWorks Operations, authentication Sierra-Yankee-052-Mike_

 _To: Valerie Gray, authentication, Victor- Lima -076-Golf_

 _Re: Contingency BLACK DAGGER_

 _Paulina and Starr have shown up at FentonWorks. They claim to have been attacked by parties unknown and have come to us for help. Proceed home, get into your car and drive down here to FentonWorks. We need you on the ground over here in case unknowns attack. Everyone on recipients list BLACK DAGGER has been advised and is on alert._

Valerie's eyes were as wide as dinner plates as they took in the utterly unexpected message. At her suggestion, they'd come up with a basic set of contingency plans soon after she'd signed on with them. The names on the recipient lists were her, Jazz, Tucker, and Danny's parents, and even now it seemed like a tad to hide their names under codenames and NATO phonetic codes, but she understood the logic. Sure it'd probably wouldn't fool their usual enemies, but the hope was to distract anyone new, and get anyone they already knew about wondering if there was anyone else they needed to be concerned about.

BLACK DAGGER was the contingency plan that was put into effect when there were signs of a threat they could not conclusively identify. This was the first time the new contingency, which focused on gathering as much intel on the enemy as possible, had been activated since it's inception.

And it revolved around Paulina and Starr.

She grimaced, her lips pursing into a thin line as she remembered her last encounters with them. She'd once counted Paulina and Starr, especially Starr, as among her very best friends. Until a certain giant green dog named Cujo had shown up and cost her father his cushy job at Axion Labs. They'd "promptly" turned on her with remarkable speed.

She winced internally at the memory of that bitter betrayal that still stung after so long. She had new friends, real friends who'd stick by her no matter what. She hadn't spared either of them more than a passing thoughtin the past year.

The Casper High grapevine suggested that they'd turned over a new leaf, that they were trying to be better people. They had a long way to go before they earned back _her_ trust. Still didn't mean that she trusted either of them if they said rain was wet. She especially didn't trust them with certain things like secret identities.

 _Whatever_ , she thought, a burst of hot irritation flooding her, I'll _believe it when_ I _see it._

She queried her suit's on-board GPS, who gave her directions to orient her to FentonWorks before she banked to the right and made her way south.

* * *

Danny Fenton sighed as he stood on the sidewalk next to Paulina, watching as Tucker walked a circle around her car, waving his handheld scanner, his dark face illuminated with the light glowing greenish tint characteristic of all FentonWorks displays like the one he was staring at so intently. Danny sighed with sympathy. Tucker had thrown himself into his work as FentonWorks computer analyst after he was forced to leave office earlier that year. His emergency appointment to mayor of Amity Park at sixteen had been the result of a casual discussion with several members of the town council in the chaos surrounding the end of the Disasteroid threat. Admittedly said members were desperate to make a change and hopefully deflect state and federal attention away from the fact that they allowed someone who wasn't even a _resident_ of the State of Indiana, let alone the Lake County or the City of Amity Park, to even stand for election in the first place. Desperate to deflect the negative attention of Indianapolis and Washington, they'd appointed Tucker the interim Mayor of Amity Park, expecting him to flounder on the job long enough for them to cover up the…irregularities

The people who had opposed the appointment (holdovers from the Montez administration) however had opposed it on the grounds that a careful reading of the town charter said that he was ineligible to either stand for or be appointed to any office until he was eighteen. And once everyone had calmed down they'd sued the City on the grounds that his appointment had been illegal. Tucker (who to his credit, realized that he'd effectively been duped by people desperate to avoid ending up spending time in a federal prison) stole a march on them by resigning. He was disappointed, but he would be damned before he ended up a puppet, or be at the center of a legal battle he was almost certainly going to lose. The states set the minimum age for elected officials at all levels of government, and Indiana state law said that he was too young. End of story.

Tucker had semi-reluctantly gone back to his usual role, their tech geek and computer analyst. For now, at least.

Right now he was shaking his head in wonderment as he perused his display. "I can't find anything, no unusual radiation, no strange magnetic resonance traces in the chassis. Nothing to corroborate anything she's told us, from the car at least."

"Were we really expecting too?"

"No," Tucker responded, and his ebony-skinned friend shook his head in frustration. "Worth a shot though."

Danny nodded, turning to the tall, darkly attractive young woman to his right. "We're going to have to take you and Starr to my mother to have you looked at by the Axion Labs clinic staff."

Paulina nodded, she opened her mouth to say something before her face notably flushed. Her mouth closed with an audible pop and she averted her gaze towards the sidewalk.

He looked at her searchingly for a second before the realization hit me.

 _She's infatuated with me_ , he realized with a start, and a smile he couldn't help broke out on his face. He'd moved on from Paulina to Sam a long time ago, but Paulina had been the object of at least the purely sexual side of his ardor for too long for him not to feel at least somewhat satisfied that she was noticing him finally. Sure she was still attractive, he wasn't blind, after all, but aside from noticing that it was much too late to expect him to be genuinely interested in return. He was happy where he was.

Still though, Danny couldn't resist it. "Cat got your tongue?" He teased.

She looked up at him, and he could tell her face was blushing. "Her accomplishments, particularly in the last year, have been all over the place," still looking at her. "It'd be an honor to meet her."

"But she's not a medical doctor," Tucker pointed that. "She's said that. Repeatedly."

"True enough," Danny said. "But we have MDs on the payroll. Quite skilled ones in fact; if there's some sort of physical evidence in either of you, between them I think they'll find it."

Paulina smiled, "Thank you, I'll go tell Starr," and she turned to go back inside.

The door opened right when she was headed towards it to reveal Sam, looking at him as if she knew exactly what was going on in his head. The two froze for a second, regarding each other before nodding to each other and resuming their respective courses.

"It's done," Sam said softly. "Valerie's on her way. Though it's a little annoying having to send her back home and have her walk. If the person or persons who came after them try again in force, we may not be able to stop them if she can't get here in time. Also…" she said, her voice trailing off.

Danny tensed. _She's found something_. _Something so disturbing that she hesitates to tell even me._

Danny cocked his head, giving her a curious look. "What have you found?"

"After I contacted Valerie," Sam said, with an apprehensive sigh. "I went through our sensor records. There was an anomalous reading in the area in question at the exact time in question. It suddenly appeared, hovered there for a few minutes before heading up a few feet before it suddenly and abruptly dropped off our sensors as though it wasn't even there. Two hours later, it appeared again for a few minutes before heading up again and pulling it's little disappearing act again."

Danny stood there as though rooted. "What the hell?" Danny said after a moment at the same time Tucker managed, "How the hell'd they do that? And why wasn't it flagged earlier? Sure we were out on our date at the time, but it should have gone to our phones. And how did we lose track of it? Those sensors can monitor everything up to low orbit."  
"Well," Sam said, brow furrowing as the brain behind it thought, "some sort of stealth ship? B-2 bombers are only visible on radar during takeoff and landing, after all. As for why neither of us was alerted to its presence, we'll have to look into that. It was probably a glitch but we can't be sure."

"Which means I have to look into it," Tucker muttered, but his eyes were lighting up at the prospect of this new mystery.

"With all your usual skill, Tuck," Danny said sincerely, putting a hand reassuringly on his shoulder. "

Danny nodded. Her day job was that she was a FentonWorks test pilot. "A stealth variant of our Speeders, perhaps?" A stealth variant of the Specter Speeder was perhaps a logical outgrowth of that particular design. It was an easy hurdle, but designing one still took time. As far as he knew _no one_ had so much as a prototype even under construction at the moment.

"That's my thinking," Sam said, "Unless one of our competitors has stolen a march on us…and is using them to kidnap people for some reason that we can't comprehend and they couldn't possibly benefit from, unless being shut down and sent to prison somehow constitutes a benefit, or there's…someone else out there. Someone with roughly the same level of capabilities we're just now beginning to attain as a species."

Danny stood there, digesting the implications of this. Sam was right, as usual. Their major competitors in aircraft design and manufacturing, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Airbus, weren't the type of companies to kidnap random people for no reason or, to use a phrase Valerie liked, "for shits and giggles."

It's not that he didn't believe that people with sick plans for personal power existed, Lord knows he'd spent two years fighting Vlad Masters! But those plans, if one put themselves in their enemy's shoes had to make sense, had to contribute to one's overall goal. Unless there were some _very_ interesting skeletons in Paulina and/or Starr's closets, the only reason anyone would go after them was their connection to him, to lure him or his friends out to get a clear shot at them.

 _Except if that's their aim, it would make more sense why them hostage and force us to try to rescue them,_ he thought with a shudder. _Sam's right,_ _someone wants something._

"Sam," he said aloud. "Once Val arrives we'll take Paulina and Starr to Axion Labs for testing. I want you and Jazz to take a Speeder out to the area, look for any signs of our unknown contact."

Sam nodded. "Will do."

"So what do you think of this situation," Danny said.

"I think we've stepped into something major," Sam said with a short, sharp nod. "Now, Jazz and I will go out looking for clues while you escort our two beautiful new clients to meet your mother," she said that last phrase just a little too quickly and a little too snippily.

Danny sighed. "You're not jealous of Paulina, are you?"

Sam turned back to face him. "Of course not," she said, again, just a little too quickly.

" _Sam_ ," he growled.

"Fine," she conceded, "a little. This is _Paulina_ , after all. You were hard after her, in _every_ way for years, and she hasn't exactly gotten any uglier."

"That was then," Danny pointed out, "this is now. Sure, she's still hot, and I couldn't resist teasing her a bit for getting all tongue-tied around me after all this time, but there's a world of difference between that and you coming home to find us in bed together."

Sam gave the reluctant sigh of someone who knew she was being just a tad unreasonable. "I know," Sam said softly.

"Besides," Danny said, gently holding her by her shoulders. "It's probably mostly a reaction to the situation. She probably won't try to act on it, and it'll probably fade in a day or two."

"And if it doesn't?"

"If it doesn't-," Danny said, "I'll turn her down, however often and hard enough for her to get the point across. Besides," he said, as much for him as her, "we'll probably get whatever's going on resolved and we can go our separate ways long before it ever becomes a problem."  
Sam laughed, her tone suggesting she didn't believe it any more than he did. If even half of what Sam's evidence implied was true, there was a new player out there, and it probably wasn't something they could send scurrying off to lick their wounds after a battle or two.

* * *

Paulina Ortega hated hospital gowns. She always had. Leaving aside the fact that they were open along the back, they also made her itch, a fact she'd discovered nearly three years earlier.

 _When I walked into the office of my mother, and my, gynecologist to be told that I had ovarian cancer,_ she thought, a trace of that old terror she'd experienced in that moment shooting down her spine. That scare had ended with them "only" removing one ovary and fallopian tube.

 _And here we go again,_ she thought with a sigh as she spread herself out on the table, _about to be scanned through an MRI machine again for signs of something wrong with me._ She closed her eyes as the hydraulic whine of the bed's servos began and she felt herself moving into the machine.

 _Think of something else_ , _girl,_ she thought, anything _else._

An image of the tall, muscular, unexpectedly _handsome_ black-haired young man in his doorway, looking at them with concern flashed into his head.

 _He_ does _clean-up nicely_ , she thought, her heart fluttering. _I'd drape myself all over that_ , she finished lamely. She sighed, flashes of memory flitting about in her head, memory of arms that weren't quite so strong, and a hard, bruising kiss. _It wouldn't be the first time._

 _Except for the fact that you weren't in control of your actions at the time, and he didn't know it,_ she thought.

The memories of that incident, where she'd apparently been possessed by a ghost and controlled into kissing Daniel Fenton had resurfaced in the last year. She wasn't entirely clear on the precise timeline, but a combination of surface memories and vague impressions had made it clear that neither had really been in a position to stop it at first. Which was also why she hadn't either tried to kill him or take him to court for "assaulting" her; it made no sense when Danny had literally no idea she hadn't been in control, at least at first. She was going to have to talk to him about that. Like as soon as she was out of this blasted machine.

 _If you can do it without babbling a lame come-on,_ she thought with a sigh. _I haven't been this disordered over a guy in_ years _. Maybe it's the fact that, on a purely physical level, your body enjoyed that kiss he gave you. And the fact that he's filled out somewhat since last you really saw him probably has something to do it._

 _And by filled out, he's six-foot-two and looks like he bench-presses small cars._

She sighed. _This is going to be a lot harder than I thought._ The opposite sex had stopped being a problem once she'd gotten passed the awkward, coltish stage of early puberty. Indeed she reveled in it. Even her last few actual relationships had been approached with an inner narrative of her as a supremely confident vamp sure in her own prowess. _It's been a long time that a guy's made me weak in the knees and filled my head with Selena Quintanilla and Enya just by_ looking _at me._

 _I'm not going to come between him and Sam,_ she thought to herself. _I'm not. Not again._ A wave of revulsion passed over her, thinking about the wave of broken hearts and destroyed relationships even her failed attempts to steal other girl's boyfriends had tended to leave in their wake. _There are other fish in the sea, Polly. Look at this one all you want, but don't try to catch it._

 _Oh, this will be so_ difficult!

* * *

Daniel Fenton sat very rigidly in his chair in the Axion Labs clinic, his thoughts a roil. Images of a Specter Speeder tumbling from the night sky in flames, malfunctioning ejection seats keeping them trapped as his girlfriend and his sister fell to their deaths in an Indiana cornfield as the unknown ship that killed them flew off in the opposite direction interspersed with some sort of chestbursting alien monstrosity exploding out of Paulina's chest and trashing the lab before proceeding to wrap a tendril around his mother's throat, and communicate with them through her.

 _Which probably means I shouldn't have watched_ Alien _and_ Independence Day _over the weekend,_ he thought sullenly. _Even so I am scared. I get scared every time Sam and Jazz have to do something like this without me. Because I'm not there to make sure they come back. Or even say goodbye._ He felt a lump form in his throat. He'd loved Sam since they were twelve years old, even when he thought he'd loved others, even the young woman who'd just gotten out of the MRI machine down the hall. His sister however… his sister was his oldest friend, as it was for all siblings in healthy relationships with each other. He'd never believed that she wasn't on his side. Not really. Vague memories flashed through his head. Vague memories of a six-year-old redhead and beside herself after her four-year-old brother had bolted into the street.

He was snapped out of her reverie when the bathroom door opened and Paulina stepped out, fully dressed once more in her jeans and tank top, her hands clasped behind her back and not meeting his gaze.

"Hey, uh, Danny," she said softly, her moderate accent strengthened by her apparent nervousness. "I need to ask you a question."

 _Well, that was quick,_ Danny thought to himself, sighing, _as he prepared the "let-her-down-easy" speech._

"I have these memories I can't quite place," she said after a moment, giving him an apprehensive look, "of you kissing me, or me kissing you. Only I felt like I wasn't in control of myself at the time."

Danny's mouth hung open for what felt like a full thirty seconds before he closed it. "Oh. I was wondering when or even if you were going to bring that up."

"So I wasn't imagining that," she said, her voice recovering much of its usual strength.

"No," Danny muttered, "you weren't."

"I gather I was possessed," she said, her voice regaining much of the usual strength he associated with Paulina, "but why?"

"It was a ghost who was apparently trying to date me to make her own boyfriend jealous," Danny said, editing on the fly any references to the fact that he knew it was Kitty, he knew exactly why she'd done what she'd done, and that it was _he_ as Danny Phantom who had gotten rid of her. "But I-er I mean Danny Phantom, figured out what was going on and stopped it before things went too far."

Paulina's eyes widened. "That's it?"

Danny stared at her, his own eyes widening. He wasn't sure what to expect, but a matter-of-fact, that's it was _not_ it.

"Gee," Danny found himself saying, voice filled with as much genuine surprise as sarcasm, "You sure are taking your horrible violation well."

She shot him a withering look that reminded him disconcertingly of the ones Sam gave him. "It wasn't _your_ fault. It's not like you knew from the start." She suddenly shot him a suspicious look. "Did you?"

"Of course not!" He bit out harshly. That, even now, was one of the most deeply painful incidents in his life. He finally had the one thing he he'd wanted more than anything in the world to that point only to discover he was being cynically manipulated by one of his enemies for advantage in a petty spat with her boyfriend.

"I was just surprised," Paulina said lightly, "I thought with, everything we now know about what your parents were working on, that they were after some secret weapon or something."

"Hardly," he muttered sullenly.

Paulina stood there,

Danny stood there, rooted by the sheer weirdness of the conversation.

"Wait!" A familiar voice said from behind him, and he turned to see his mother, Valerie, Tucker, and Starr all standing behind her.

"We've got a problem," she said, eyes wide with the fear he rarely saw on her face. "A big one."

* * *

Samantha Ariel Manson's gloved fingers tapped a course correction into the Specter Speeder Mark Two's flight control panel as she directed the Specter Speeder of it's wide circular orbit over the area where Paulina and Starr reported their encounter, while Jazz manned the suite of sensors scanning the ground and everything in a ten mile radius of their ship for any sign of abnormalities. It was a task that the Mark Two's were more than suited for. This was not a small car converted into a flying gas can designed for short-range hops into the Ghost Zone (though they'd somehow managed to fly it as far away as Colorado without it hitting turbulence and falling out of the sky). This was a purpose-built multirole short-range aircraft and spacecraft (in addition to it's usual role of entering the Ghost Zone). She was nearly nine meters long, three meters high, had a wingspan of just over five and a half meters, and weighed fifty tons with single stage to orbit capability. She had the very best in sensors, electronic countermeasures, and electronic counter-countermeasures that Vlad and the Fentons between them had developed prior to the Asteroid Crisis, and she had eight hardpoints that could be used to fit weapons to provide fire support for ground forces. For a science fiction nerd like her it was everything she'd ever wanted out of a ship fitting that mission profile.

"Anything?" She asked, her voice slightly muffled by her helmet. The fully-enclosing space helmet, designed to attach airtight around her suit's collar were required in the event that they ended up having to go into space and even then had to bail. That contingency was also why their red flight suits were full pressure suits with three hours of air in them, more than enough time for another Specter Speeder to hopefully reach them and pull them in before they suffocated. Or at the very least compose their last wills and testaments.

"No," Jasmine said from the ECO's station, behind and to the right of the flight controller's station, shaking her head in frustration. "I'm not getting anything. No weather abnormalities that we weren't expecting, no unusual traces of radiation, no odd electromagnetic signatures, nothing. Our unknown aircraft didn't leave anything behind for us to investigate."

"And no aircraft that shouldn't be there," she said.

"Apart from liners landing at O'Hare and Midway, no joy," Jazz responded.

"Hmm," Sam said, leaning back in her chair and staring at her board and queried her navigational display. There was nothing between them on a flight path that took them from their location into low orbit. She checked her fuel status, and found she had more than enough fuel for what she had in mind

 _But it's not going to work,_ she thought sighing. If there were alien small craft operating on Earth, it stood to reason they had either a support base or a mothership or both in the area to base at and service them. A mothership under a competent captain and crew (assuming it had either of those things and wasn't automated) would be parked out of radar range, and while a small craft could theoretically build up speed and coast towards it, it'd be inefficient. On the one hand, space being space, unless one knew where to look, a spacecraft could basically hide anywhere indefinitely once out of radar range.

On the other hand, servicing small craft would become terribly inefficient.  
Either way, the thought that she could take her ship on a quick jaunt out of the atmosphere, scan for a few minutes, and pick up an alien carrier and/or battleship hanging out in radar range and waiting to get nuked out of the sky was kind of wishful thinking on her part.

Then again, there could be a base (or bases) on Earth they were operating out of.

"Sam!" Jazz blurted, voice spiking with alarm. "We're picking up a priority burst transmission from FentonWorks Ops! It's a general transmission across all FentonWorks frequencies."

 _But not directed specifically at us,_ Sam thought, brow creasing with worry.

" _PRIORITY*PRIORITY*PRIORITY*PRIORITY_ " The automated, vaguely feminine voice of the message header said, right before Danny broke in.

" _To_ Humble _and_ Levelheaded _!_ " Danny's frantic voice shouted over the comms, using the codenames for Sam and Jazz that (as per tradition) were the exact _opposite_ of their personalities. " _We've been compromised! There were_ microchips _embedded in our guests! As nearest as we can tell they've been transmitting continuously. They have our home and our lab's locations._ Do not _head home. Repeat, do_ not _head home. Proceed direct to black site; we will attempt to remove and destroy tracking microchips before proceeding to black site with our guests. There will be no further transmissions_." She heard her boyfriend's voice catch in his throat. _Good luck._ "

"Shit!" Sam swore as soon as Danny was off the air, entering commands into her control panel. "Stop playing to the local airports' tender sensibilities, go full active. If there's _anything_ in my sky that shouldn't be and we can detect it, I want to know it. The FAA can bill me later. Clear?"

"Clear," Jazz said, tapping commands into her console, "Radar is at full power, though if there is some sort of stealth speeder out there, if it operates on our understanding of stealth technology it'll only be visible at takeoff or landing. Anything else will look like a bird until it's much, much too late."

Sam sighed, "I know. I'm coming one-seven-six degrees to port at one-half power." _And I hope to God we don't get there to find out all is lost._


End file.
